Auto battlers such as Teamfight Tactics, Auto Chess or Battlegrounds have long been established in the video game scene. In these, a random selection of units is – quite simply – tactically placed on a playing field and then sent in an automated battle against the opposing team. While a large number of auto battlers have been released digitally, the analog version is looking pretty poor. Nevertheless, with Challengers, the relatively young genre already has a representative who will win the 2023 prize. Expert game of the year was able to get hold of. AIPokalypse is the name of a new representative in the genre, which is March 26th Kickstarter and wants to make the concept appealing to frequent players. Find out how AIPokalypse is doing in this crowdfunding preview.
INFO: We are dealing with the prototype of the game here. The final product may therefore still contain various changes. The prototype was available to us as an English version - therefore, individual terms in our article may differ from the German version of the game.
The AIpocalypse came quickly. Within a few hours, a civil war-like situation broke out. Weapons of mass destruction were detonated and all digital networks had to be destroyed or permanently shut down. An artificial intelligence has managed to trigger an apocalypse that is causing our world to collapse. Only a few splinter groups are left, fighting for their survival. They must penetrate former cities to find food and digital artifacts to ensure their survival. But these are hotly contested.
Auto Battler for frequent players
In AIPokalypse we take over the leadership of one of the remaining factions, which moves into the contested zone, the former city, for food and digital artifacts. With the help of the cards that you draw each round, each player builds a troop that fights against all the other opponents at the same time. When building the troop, you have to pay attention to the effects and synergies of the individual units, because only by cleverly combining them can you ultimately achieve victory. The faction that has the last life points wins the game.
AIPokalypse has an interesting structure, because each type of card has a different function on its back. Faction cards have ammunition and units on the back, so-called "slots". The units themselves must first be placed on these in order to go into battle. This means that with your own starting hand of 6 cards, cards must first be played face down as "slots" in order to then be able to place units on them.
Special units are units that have stronger abilities and can only be summoned by the so-called "triple" - more on that in a moment. They also have "slots" on the back, which give certain bonuses as soon as the unit lying on them reaches a certain strength. At the same time, the special units cards count as life points. At the start of a game, each player has 6 life points and thus 6 hidden special units. If you lose life points during the game, the lost lives are deducted from the hidden stack of special units. However, these special units are now visible to the player and can therefore be used much more tactically.
special units and combos
If you have three units of the same color and number in slots on the board or in your hand during the course of a game, you can trigger what is known as a "triple." To do this, you discard these three cards and summon one of the special units revealed so far. If you haven't lost any life points up to that point, you draw two cards from your life point deck and choose one. The special unit takes on the strength points of the units it replaces. This means that cards that have been discarded from your hand do not bring any additional strength into play.
In general, units gain additional strength through the effects of the individual cards. For example, the hacker (in the picture on the right) gives a strength to another human unit at the beginning of each round. Over the course of a game, you try to generate strong combos one by one, which can then gain even more strength. The card effects not only provide us with strength, however, but also give us the resource ammunition, which allows us to temporarily improve our units by two combat points or permanently by one strength. They also give us various bonuses in battle, let us draw cards and much more.
Automatic battles
After the first phase of recruiting units is completed, the game moves on to the combat phase. Just like the digital model, this also runs fully automatically in AIPokalypse. This is solved by a combat deck, which is prepared at the beginning of the combat phase. This consists of as many cards from the standard unit stack as the number of units placed in slots by a person. This means that if the opposing player has placed 4 units in their slots, but you only have 3, we both draw 4 units each face down for our combat deck.
We then draw the top card of the prepared battle deck and place it in a color-matching manner on the unit furthest to the left in a slot. If the drawn battle card does not match a unit in the slots, that unit fights on its own. The battle strength is then calculated. This consists of the number of the unit drawn from the battle deck and the strength of the placed unit marked in the slot. The strength is then compared with that of the opposing player. The person with the greatest strength wins the current battle. Everyone else must place their used battle card face down in front of the unit used in the battle to mark that they lose one life point and the unit is no longer available for the rest of the battle phase. This loop continues until all cards have been drawn from the battle deck.
At the end of the combat phase, all face-down combat cards are added together. The difference in points between you and the player who has won the most battles is the damage you suffer in the battle. This means that if your opponent has won three battles and you have only won one, you lose 2 life points. These are deducted from the life point deck. All used combat cards are then discarded and a new round begins.
No downtime
The idea for AIPokalypse came about in 2018. Initially as a trick-taking game with permanent abilities. With the release of Hearthstone's Auto Battler mode called Battlegrounds in 2019, game author Marian Hilgers came up with the brilliant idea that made AIPokalypse the game it is today. All players recruit and fight at the same time, which means that a game has no downtime at all and can be decided within 20 minutes. In addition, AIPokalypse has many interesting decisions that can be made due to simultaneous play. You need a few games at the beginning to really get into the game, but over time the game gets faster and more tactical. This makes AIPokalypse a great game for frequent players who want to play something in between - during their lunch break, after work or on vacation. Or as a nightcap on a game night.
We definitely had a lot of fun with AIPokalypse and I personally thought it was great that there is also a very well-functioning co-op mode that also works well solo! This is already quite challenging in the standard game, but can be made even more challenging thanks to an expansion that will be available from the start of the Kickstarter campaign. Here we play through a kind of mini-campaign that constantly presents us with new tasks. There are also the so-called artifacts that bring further effects into the game.
It is also nice that Owly Moly Games is committed to good quality and will produce the game in an environmentally friendly way within the EU. Stretch goals will be purely cosmetic in nature, because it is important that everything that is game-related will be completely present from the start. I would like to warmly recommend AIPokalypse, because it is really a lot of fun and is at least worth a look. March 26th AIPokalypse will be launched on Kickstarter be available.
Information about AIPokalypse
Number of players: 1 – 4 Age: from 12 years Playing time: 20 - 50 minutes Difficulty: Connoisseur to expert game Classification: Auto-Battler, Hand-Management Author: Marian Hilgers Illustrations: Marian Hilgers Publisher: Owly Moly Games Official Website: Link Link to the campaign: Kickstarter Start of the campaign: March 26, 2024 |
Preview | Product | Rating | Price | |
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ZMan, Challengers!, Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023, Family Game,... * | 24,99 EUR |
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